how to control your dreams

is it possible

yes. dream control is well documented in lab studies going back to the 1980s, where lucid dreamers performed agreed actions on cue and signaled with their eyes. but a 2025 systematic review made a distinction that matters: awareness and control are separate. you can be fully lucid and unable to change anything. you can steer a dream a little without being clearly lucid. the two skills develop at different rates, and control is the slower one. that is why this guide starts with awareness and why totem rates the two separately.

first, become lucid

there is no control without awareness, and awareness is trained, not wished for. the method with research support is to remember your dreams, notice what is usually strange in them, rehearse recognizing it before sleep, and practice on nights when you wake late. the whole thing is in how to lucid dream. if you are searching for dream control without lucidity, the honest answer is that what you think about before sleep shapes dream tone, and personally meaningful material enters dreams more often, but that is influence, not control.

the first ten seconds: stabilizing

the moment you realize you are dreaming, two things happen: a rush of excitement, and the dream starting to thin. most beginners wake up right here. the whole skill of early control is to survive this moment, and the way to do it is to be boring.

1. slow down. do not shout, do not leap, do not try to fly yet.
2. look at your hands. they anchor attention in the dream body, and the odd fingers confirm you are dreaming.
3. touch something. rub your hands together, press a wall, feel the ground. touch is the sense that holds a dream best.
4. say it once, calmly: i am dreaming, and i am staying.
5. choose one small action. walk to the door. pick something up. look around slowly.

if the dream fades anyway, spinning on the spot or rubbing your hands as it goes sometimes carries you into a new scene, still lucid. if you wake, stay still and go straight back; a lucid dream can sometimes be re-entered from a brief wake, which is the idea behind deild.

what people do in lucid dreams

in a survey of 301 lucid dreamers, 81% named fun and exploration as their reason. after that: dealing with nightmares, 64%; solving problems, 30%; creative ideas, 28%; practicing a skill, 21%. the realistic list of what most people can do with practice: fly, change the scene by walking through a door or turning around, summon or talk to a dream character, change the light, and ask the dream a question and see what it does. what is hard, even for experienced practitioners: fine control of details, reading long text, and keeping a dream going past the rem period that carries it.

things to try first

once the dream is stable, control is mostly expectation. dream physics follows what you are sure of, not what you hope for. these are the acts that work for most people early, in roughly the order they tend to succeed.

1. change the light. decide it is brighter, or that it is dawn. lighting responds to expectation more readily than anything else in a dream.
2. walk through a door expecting a place. do not try to conjure the place; be certain it is behind the door and open it.
3. ask a dream character a question. what are you here for, what is this place. the answers are often strange and sometimes useful, and the act of asking keeps you lucid.
4. fly. push off the ground expecting to rise, or fall backward and let it turn into flight. excitement is the risk here; keep it slow.
5. read something, then read it again. watch it change. this is not control, but it is the clearest demonstration you can give yourself that you are in a dream, and it makes the next act easier.

rehearsing a skill in a dream

small controlled studies have tested whether practicing inside a lucid dream carries over. people rehearsed a coin toss, a finger-tapping sequence, and darts inside lucid dreams. their next-day results improved, within the same range as waking mental rehearsal, and in the darts study, distraction inside the dream erased the effect. these are small studies, graded c on the research pages, and they say something modest and real: a lucid dream is a place where deliberate practice is possible, and focus matters there as much as it does awake.

why control fails, and why that is fine

control fails when you expect it to, when you try too hard, and when the dream is unstable. expectation is most of it: dream physics follows belief, so a door you are sure leads to the sea usually does, and a door you hope leads to the sea usually does not. the fix is confidence you do not feel yet, which is why control comes with practice rather than instruction. and failed control is not failed lucidity. a 2022 analysis found that the benefits people report track positive, successful dreams, which is a reason to practice gently and to count every moment of awareness as the win it is. a dream that turns against you is covered in lucid nightmares.

awareness is the skill. control is what you build on top of it

tracking it

keep two columns in your journal: how much you knew, and what you could do. they move at different speeds, and seeing the first one rise while the second stays flat is the normal shape of the first months. totem records both each morning, awareness on a three-step scale and control as what you did, and shows them side by side across fourteen nights. the record is what tells you the practice is working before the flying does.

questions people ask